top of page

By:

Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Fractured Crown

Between Siddaramaiah’s grip on power and Shivakumar’s restless ambition, the Karnataka Congress is trapped in a succession spiral. Karnataka Karnataka today has two chief ministers - one by office, the other by expectation. The power tussle between Siddaramaiah and his deputy, D.K. Shivakumar, has slipped so completely into the open that the Congress’s ritual denials sound like political farce. A whispered ‘understanding’ after the 2023 victory that each would get the CM’s post after...

Fractured Crown

Between Siddaramaiah’s grip on power and Shivakumar’s restless ambition, the Karnataka Congress is trapped in a succession spiral. Karnataka Karnataka today has two chief ministers - one by office, the other by expectation. The power tussle between Siddaramaiah and his deputy, D.K. Shivakumar, has slipped so completely into the open that the Congress’s ritual denials sound like political farce. A whispered ‘understanding’ after the 2023 victory that each would get the CM’s post after two-and-a-half years has hardened into a public confrontation between a chief minister determined to finish five years and a deputy increasingly unwilling to wait. The recent breakfast meeting between the two men at Siddaramaiah’s residence was presented as a truce where the ‘high command’ was invoked as the final arbiter. “There are no differences between us,” Siddaramaiah insisted, twice for emphasis. Few were convinced and soon, Shivakumar was again hinting darkly at change. For weeks, Shivakumar’s loyalists have been holding meetings, mobilising legislators and making pilgrimages to Delhi to get the Congress high command to honour its promise. They insist that the Congress leadership agreed to a rotational chief ministership in 2023 and that November 2025 was always meant to mark Shivakumar’s ascent. The high command, for its part, has perfected the art of strategic vagueness by neither confirming nor denying the pact. This suggests that the Congress does not merely hesitate to act against Siddaramaiah, but increasingly lacks the capacity to do so. From the outset of his second innings, Siddaramaiah has given no signal of easing aside. As he approaches January 2026, poised to overtake D. Devaraj Urs as Karnataka’s longest-serving chief minister, the symbolism is unmistakable. The mantle of social justice politics that Urs once embodied now firmly sits on Siddaramaiah’s shoulders. And it is this social coalition that shields him. His fortress is AHINDA - minorities, backward classes and Dalits. Leaked figures from the unreleased caste census suggest that these groups together approach or exceed two-thirds of the state’s population. Lingayats and Vokkaligas, once electorally dominant, are rendered numerical minorities in this arithmetic. Siddaramaiah governs not merely as a Congress leader, but as the putative custodian of Karnataka’s demographic majority. That claim is reinforced through policy. Minority scholarships have been revived, contractor quotas restored, residential schools expanded. More than Rs. 42,000 crore has been earmarked for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Kurubas, his own community, have been pitched for Scheduled Tribe status, with careful assurances that their elevation will not disadvantage others. DK Shivakumar brings organisational muscle, financial clout and control over the Vokkaliga heartland. In electoral campaigns, these are formidable assets. But in a confrontation with a leader who embodies a 60–70 percent social coalition, they are blunt instruments. The Congress high command understands this equation, even if it publicly pretends otherwise. It also remembers, uneasily, what Siddaramaiah did the last time his authority was constrained. In 2020, when the Congress–JD(S) coalition collapsed after 16 MLAs defected to Mumbai,13 of them hailed from Siddaramaiah’s camp. At the time, he held the post of coordination committee chairman. Instead, he emerged as the principal beneficiary of collapse, returning as Leader of the Opposition with a tighter grip on the party. If the Congress high command could not punish him then, it is doubtful it can coerce him now. Shivakumar’s predicament is thus more tragic than tactical. He is not battling a rival alone, but an entire political structure built to outlast him. The promised coronation looks increasingly like a mirage drifting just ahead of a man condemned to keep walking. For the Congress, the cost of this paralysis is already visible. A government elected on guarantees and governance is consumed by succession. The party’s authority is dissolving while its factions harden. The Congress returned to power in Karnataka after years in the wilderness, only to re-enact the same leadership dysfunction that has crippled it elsewhere. Regardless of whether Siddaramaiah survives this storm, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Congress cannot survive the slow corrosion of its command in one of the few states it holds today.

Unequal Law

Few legal asymmetries in India expose the uneasy bargain between secularism, vote-bank politics, and gender justice as starkly as the continuing permissibility of polygamy for Muslim men. While Hindu, Christian, Sikh and Parsi men have been bound by monogamy for decades, Sunni Muslim personal law still allows up to four wives.


For decades, India’s political class has treated Muslim polygamy as an awkward inheritance best left untouched. That uneasy settlement is now under strain following the recent landmark survey by the Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), based on 2,508 Sunni women across seven states.


The survey has dragged the hidden costs of polygamy out of private misery and into the national ledger. Its findings are profoundly political. The BMMA documents sharp health deterioration among first wives: chronic sleep disorders, hypertension, migraines, thyroid dysfunction, menstrual problems and diabetes - all at rates significantly higher than among second wives. Mental health outcomes are grimmer still. Insomnia, anxiety, depression, helplessness and social withdrawal stalk the first wife with disturbing regularity.


Since Independence, successive governments have treated Muslim personal law as a domain too electorally sensitive to reform. The bitter memory of the Shah Bano case in 1985 when Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress-led government overturned a Supreme Court judgment granting maintenance rights to a divorced Muslim woman under pressure from conservative clerics has cast a long shadow. It taught politicians that touching Muslim personal law carried the price of organised backlash, and possibly electoral loss.


Apologists insist polygamy is rare, or that it is divinely regulated when in fact it embeds a hierarchy in law between men and women, and among women themselves. It legalises emotional, economic and sexual asymmetry under the authority of the state. It weakens women’s bargaining power inside marriage and normalises abandonment under the disguise of legality.


The Supreme Court has described polygamy as an “injurious practice” even while acknowledging its legal status under Muslim personal law. Several Muslim-majority countries - from Tunisia to Turkey - have banned it altogether. India, for all its constitutional claims, remains on the more regressive side of this divide.


Why the hesitation? The answer lies in the peculiar coalition that has guarded this privilege. Conservative religious bodies defend polygamy as theological necessity. So-called ‘secular intellectuals,’ wary of being seen as ‘majoritarian,’ treat criticism of regressive Muslim practices as cultural trespass.


This is not secularism but a clear abdication of women’s rights which these secularists and feminists claim to champion in so shrill a manner. The irony that these upholders of secularist values fail to see is that Muslim women themselves have been among the most persistent voices for change. They ask for the same marital certainty that other Indian women take for granted.


Banning polygamy may not instantaneously transform social behaviour. But it will declare, unambiguously, that the Indian state recognises only one equal partnership at a time. That is not a cultural imposition. It is the minimum architecture of modern gender justice. 


Comments

bottom of page